When you’re a big company, especially one that makes its money on free web services and advertising, it’s very easy to say you love open source.

Open Source will get you nice PR, and you may even release parts of your code to get even better PR. Sadly, things don’t always work as you expect them to.

The legal department of Facebook has recently forbidden EventPress developer, Kunal Bhalla, to continue his (brilliant) work on EventPress, as it’s similar to a Facebook product (Facebook events).

I’m afraid I currently have to stop working on EventPress — the open source/legal department at my new employer: FB informed me today that I’m not allowed to contribute to anything that is similar to a product offered by Facebook (events). Please feel free to fork and develop it further as you require.

Regards,
Kunal

[ here's the announcement: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/eventpress/olNCfNZfEP0 ]

EventPress is a well written open source plug-in that provides a non trivial feature such as event management to wordpress site owners. As event management is not easy stuff, there are not many contenders.

Apparently, Kunal got hired by Facebook, and subsequently had to stop his open source development right after.

It’s a real shame things have to go like that.

Well, I deleted mine some time ago, but while trying out the new Youtube homepage the first thing I saw was this:

My circles are still saved, my real name is showing and the same is probably true for the people in my circles.

Yet another reminder: don’t believe the big guys, data deletion doesn’t exists on the Internet, no matter what. There’s no escape, you access the internet, you get sold.

Just a quick notice to let you lovely foreigners know that the italian version of Wikipedia just closed everything down in sign of protest against yet another attempt to censor the Internet by the Italian Government.

Try the following link for info, or any other page: http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/

You can also read the english version of the notice.

Really, you wouldn’t dare..

• rickspencer3 proposes pulling the gimp from the CD:
  • It takes up a lot of space that we need for couchdb, etc…
  • F-Spot has key features, like crop and red-eye removal
  • It’s a power user tool, users shouldn’t stumble into it
• Discussion points brought up that
  • The gimp currently uses 26 megs of space, 20 of which are documentation, which could be moved online
  • The gimp, though not totally user friendly, is very useful, and does not require “importing” to edit

ZOMG !

No offense to Rick Spencer but.. How reasonable is the rationale behind this ? That f-spot is enough ? Enough for what ? For laughing ?

How do I scale an image in f-spot ? If there’s a way, I have not been able to find it (same for red eyes). How do I annotate an image (putting text somewhere) ?

Yet people ask “Gimp is cool but.. should it belong to LiveCD?” I’ll give you a better question: what should belong to the LiveCD ?

Removing GIMP from the LiveCd fully defeats the showing off purpouse of the LiveCd and leaves you without any handy tool to perform even basic manipulation on images. Now, it can be just me, but I can’t find anything useful in that regard inside Jaunty’s f-spot.

I can’t see how f-spot belongs to the live cd more than the Gimp. And sure the Gimp UI sucks (at least, I hate it. Not that I love f-spot‘s though) but it can take burden of tasks that nothing else provides. Should we leave our users without even basic image manipulation, just like OS X users ? Shouldn’t Ubuntu be better than that ?

Resolution

The following decision has been taken:

• The current plan of record is:
  • Keep the gimp in the default install
  • If we need the room, switch the gimp to online only documentation
  • If we still need the room, kick it out altogether

Sanity prevailed. Sort of. I mean, I’m happy with at least the first two points of it.

I hate bringing up the old Mono issue (and my prophetic joke) every 2 minutes, but.. if you need space, why not strip 50mb of run-time ? How come it’s desirable to replace Rhythmbox with Banshee (based on minimal feature difference) and then having to strip the Gimp ?

An emergency plan would be to strip Mono, replace Banshee with Rhythmbox, replace Tomboy with Gnote (about which many untrue things have been told) and f-spot with gThumb or Solang (which is promising) and gain 40-50 mb of disk space. Not stripping the Gimp.

This is not out of Mono hate, is out of need.

Bad news today. Out of the jealousy of not being able to create one decent default theme for years, Canonical has just decided to shut down the Ubuntu Satanic Edition store (t-shirt and other gadgets).

The reasons are pretty much understandable (and btw they didn’t complain about their domain name yet) but the decision itself imho sucks.

Too easy to be bold on updating behaviour and be scared about death metal.

Update: Jono Bacon (Canonical employee) promised to look after the issue. We trust him, he is from metal

Nevertheless, if you want to make your voice heard, here’s the contact:

Michelle Surtees-Myers
Canonical UK Ltd
mailto:**removed**

Update: The issue has been cleared up already. Thanks Satan Jono !

Is something starting ? What ?! A war ?…

The Mono Crusade

What’s wrong with the Mono fans ? As summer gets near and temperature raises they’re getting annoying like mosquitoes. That’s something I really don’t like.

I’m a Mono user myself. Either for birth (Ubuntu includes Mono applications by default) and choice (I’m currently a Gnome Do Docky user and I’ve used Tomboy extensively in the past). I’m also the starter of the Rapache project, a Python application which actually includes (or used to, I don’t remember right now) a plugin to make it easier to configure Mono under Apache.

Still Novell secret and exclusionary exclusive deal with Microsoft gives me shivers, as does its GPL2 license which explicitly forbids it to be redistributed as GPL3 and the Microsoft promise not to sue over Mono, which covers Novell customers (?) directly.

That said, I can fully understand who doesn’t want Mono installed by default, and those who remove it altogether and look good replacements. What I don’t understand is all that fuss.

The Faith

It seems, though, that this is a problem for many people. Leaving the choice to have no mono or remove it without losing half of the functionality worries some mono supporters. Others have issues with people publicly saying they don’t like or trust Mono. Is that a war ? Is Mono a religion ? An holy war ?

• I am the Lord your God : I’m god. And good. Regardless.
• You shall have no other gods before me : I’m better than C++. Really. And even if Python is going to become a problem in the future, don’t loose your faith, we’ll deal with that.
• You shall not make for yourself an idol:  No application is really good. It’s good because it uses Mono runtime. Press developers to port their stuff to Mono.
• You shall not make wrongful use of the name of your God: never cite the deals. never cite the patents. ever.
• Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy: post about 1 random topic at least every six anti-mono-nono rants. Keep it credible.
• Honor your father and mother: Microsoft is not that bad. Novell won’t be acquired. The (exclusive) IP properties don’t risk to be reached by bad hands
• You shall not murder: never strip my run-time from the LiveCD.
• You shall not commit adultery: Let’s iterate it again. My run-time is good for everything.
• You shall not steal: Don’t port Tomboy. Ever.
• You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor: as long he develops Mono applications. Canonical is not your neighbor, thou shalt not have the minimum respect for them.
• You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife: Dropbox is not your neighbor’s wife.
• You shall not covet anything that belongs to your neighbor: replace it. Even with outdated software. Cry on a random planet and ask for someone to package an application with outdated dependencies. Also replace Rhythmbox.

The campaigns

Gnote, the great offense

Destiny was humorous enough to bring out the first Gnote release on April 1st. So many people, me included, believed it was an April fool. A Tomboy port, how cool ! Turned out the project was real, and a bunch of bugfix releases followed in the next days.

This port has been foreseen from a long time and a long list of “thank you !” formed in the comments of the developer web.

While the Tomboy development team feedback was thankfully pretty sober, declaring itself against duplication of feature and bugfixes, not everyone was happy.

Don’t forget to raise doubts about eventual copyright infringements. Also remember to rant about Gnote being GPL 3, while Tomboy GPL2 because features can’t be ported back. (switching Tomboy to GPL 3 would take probably less than 30 minutes, discussion and upload included). And it’s not that any open source fan may appreciate GPL 3 software, really.

Never mind  the fact Gnote would take a (big) dependency out of Gnome.

Python sucks BTW

Of course, porting is such a big crime. Never mind the number of requests on the Gnome Zeitgeist post asking for a Mono port. Sure enough, porting Tomboy is awful, still, porting Zeitgeist would be so nice. The Zeitgeist developer just replied it’s Python and that’s going to stay as it is, but after a bunch of days they eventually came out with a Dbus interface to let everyone develop their plugins the way they want (without annoying the upstream).

Drop that Box

Really. Don’t mess with DropBox. A year ago or so everyone were crying out of joy of having finally a commercial company to provide first class support for Linux, including Nautilus integration, open source client software, pre-made packages for popular distributions as Ubuntu, a well integrated wizard that let you create an user account without even opening a browser, support for symlinks and 2 gb of awesomeness for absolutely no money.

Dropbox popularity among Linux users got so high to (mis)lead many people to (wrongly) bash Canonical for releasing Ubuntu One as it was (wrongly) seen as a competitor of the beloved Dropbox.

Yet, here we go again with another non-sense campaign. Drop that box, go iFolder. It’s totally open source, right ? While Dropbox is proprietary (the binary codecs downloaded from the Microsoft website by Moonlight, instead, are free and perfectly fine. Keep in mind those are licensed to be run only inside a browser, whatever that means).

Let’s use that, even if it’s an headache to package, since it’s just a resuscitated outdated software which relies on Mono version 1.2.6. Not a problem, let’s cry out loud on the Ubuntu Planet and ask someone to step in and take the burden to package it. So we can have two versions of Mono installed at the same time (two is better than mono !). Add 5 points if you succeed in persuading your distro leaders to ship both versions of Mono on the LiveCd. Shall we lack space, we may strip OpenOffice. Or the Network manager. Or whatever. (update: or the Gimp)

Crank up and scream on your Banshee

Speaking of Banshee, now it’s 6 megabytes less than Rhythmbox. Ah, the bloated (?) Rhythmbox. Fuck the rhythmcrap, doesn’t matter if Banshee still crashes on some mp3s (as exhaile does, btw), let’s put that on the LiveCd, it’s Mono – it can’t be that bad !

We can save 6 megabytes (that’s right kids) to be used for OpenJDK (?!?), or maybe add some more localization language (what about Klingon ?).

If you really want to shave some hair from the LiveCd, remove Mono altogether. It will shave a whole 40+ mb of space. Tomboy can be replaced with Gnote (as Fedora will do from now on). F-Spot is more tricky – left as a (pretty difficult) exercise for the reader. (update: Solang could do)

Don’t forget to discuss this as well at the Karmic UDS.

The promised land

Why are Mono people so desperate of getting and their run-time to take roots everywhere ? It can be good, but shouldn’t it be left as a choice ? Sometimes I wonder if someone received any ‘succeed or die mission’.

Ubuntu makes up for such a nice place for Mono. It’s not a fundamentalist distribution to any extent. It even ships binary drivers and has specialized repositories for non-free stuff and commercial stuff. Mono is already there. Packaged in the main repository. That means it’s officially supported by Canonical. It’s already shipped on the live CD.

What could you desire more than that ?

Python sucks BTW (2!!)

Even if already otherwise stated a few times somewhere else, news has been spread that Canonical’s Ubuntu One service is based on iFolder.

Finally ! Acceptance, social recognition, moral revenge !  Rubén actually leaves beyond any consideration (of any kind), including caring to actually check the source code, and goes further stating:

So now, let’s wait and see how people start using the mono argument against UbuntuOne (even if it ends up being wrong)… People have too much time available for ranting.

Well, thank you, actually I didn’t have any ranting time slot available, but your post motivated me enough to find it. It’s not just incorrect, but also erroneusly links Canonical to Mono development and tries to ride the hype of Ubuntu One. That’s bloody crazy. Seems to me you actually have enough time for ranting, but no time to check the source.

Also, you didn’t even bother to correct your post. I normally would think that was just a mistake, but keeping the post as it is, and even stating in advance it could be wrong makes it seem just an attempt to start a big flame. And it did. You got me (at least).

To me, Canonical developing in Mono rather than Python, seems a big non sense. And not for ideological reasons, just for pratical ones. Not for a big product like this. Not now.

And yes I am making a controversial statement just in order to get this discussion rolling from a different perspective.

Wishing people to bash Canonical for Mono is not just plain stupid and coward, but doesn’t help Mono at all.

The Truth about Mono

Mono is here to stay

And it’s likely to stay for a while. That’s a well known truth, and one that get’s repeated over and over again by Mono supporters. And it’s likely to be a realistic one. Mono not just makes application migration easier towards linux (but not automatic at all, by the way, some big pieces of code are likely to need rewriting by the way), but it spreads many platforms. There’s some interest from game producers for example. Statically compiled Mono applications can run on the iPhone, also. And it runs on Windows. Sure, the developer base on XBox and iPhone is not probably big right now, but it increases the chances of long term adoption.

The Mono argument is here to stay, also

Sure as hell. At least until the license doesn’t get rid of the anti GPL 3 clause, the Novell-Microsoft deal get public and the patent policy gets explicit and public as well. And yes, Microsoft may have sued people for many other patents and never did (ops, they did). And yes, because it’s Microsoft stuff.

Do you realize what a patent is ? It’s like a nuclear weapon. If you have a patent on something but the guy you want to sue has a patent on your stuff, then you’d better stay calm. But in the same way governments and seasons change, companies also change leaders or get sold or fail. And those IP properties get sold or fail with them. And the equilibrium changes. That’s what the OIN is all about (declaratedly, a threat against threateners).

What follows is an accurate research to find some new fish to be trolled. It has to be big enough to get some money back to the house but not big enough to trigger a patent war. It’s far too easy to say Open Source every two words, market your self as an open source zealot and bash free-as-in-beer binary blobs and then say Mono is good because it’s open source. It’s patented and potentially litigable. Microsoft itself says so, when stating they won’t sue Novell customers (oh, by the way, any Novell customer amongst the readers ? Anyone ? … ok.). Novell also aknowledged that, legitimating their claim by signing the deal.

Is that what you call a competitive environment ? A free market environment ? Would call that free ? It’s just a good way to shut down successful start ups before they get big enough to defend.

Now, there’s not scientifical nor legally demonstrable proof that Mono is a real threat (patents are not disclosed, may be not valid, etc), but there are concerns. And heavy ones. Shuttleworth himself was concerned by the Novell deal (even if now he seems more comfortable with that). Red Hat has been concerned with Mono, and plans to replace Tomboy with Gnote as their default note application. Bruce Perens (creator or the Open Source definition) explicitly stated to be concerned about Mono. The Samba Team was deeply concerned.

Those are not your average Joes (otherwise feel free to invite me in your neighborhood). If those people are concerned, why wouldn’t an average open source supporter ?

Mind you: Open Source is about rejecting discrimination, now  – what does that have to do with a patent license for Novell customers ?

Let me iterate it again

Just before someone replies stating that a lot of ground is already patented, and cites – let’s say – Microsoft patents in COM that permeate the most popular pieces of software in Ubuntu, or stuff like that. Patent concerns are always there, and are there to stay. Still, what makes Mono different is the patent agreement itself.

Only a dumbass may think that violating a patent that you didn’t know even existed and deliberately violating a patent you know about are the same thing.

The agreement legitimates the patents existence and their validity concerns. Did I mention such agreement will also timeout in 2012 ? Will they renew it ? Or not ? Prepare yourself for a great suspense !

Here are the big questions

Why don’t you just work on Mono without needlessly bashing other software, companies, individuals ? Why don’t you refrain on trying to get your run-time included everywhere as a required dependency ?

Didn’t people gave you the chance (read: acceptance) to have mono included in the repositories and installed with a click ? Is that important to not let people make the choice to not use it ?

While the Banshee campaign is not totally meaningless, I’m pretty amazed by the Dropbox bashing campaign. I’m perhaps still too young and innocent to believe that’s a Novell comploct, or something that has anything to do with the Mono team itself. I’m more inclined to think it’s a random cry out coming out a scattered group of individuals that’s eager to show the world that one doesn’t really need to be that clever to talk. Mostly because that’s pretty much detrimental to Mono.

Let’s talk about FUD

What a cool word. Talking about FUD is so fashionable this days. Weird enough it’s common to see Mono supporters accusing Mono detractors to spread FUD (but you can eat that like a breakfast, right ?). They also spread the lie (because that’s what it’s called) that Mono is bashed just because it bases on Microsoft specifications (which would be true, if we widen the topic to eventual patents covering the specifications, but that’s not what they usually mean).

It also doesn’t take a genius to understand that if a company (Novell in our case) makes a secret patent agreement with a third party, and people get annoyed enough from that to criticize that regreetable choice, the ones to be blamed are not the people.

Let me help you with this one (it’s hard) :

• Microsoft spread FUD and begins asking patent protection to Linux distributors
• Microsoft made a deal with Novell, thereby accentuating the patent FUD and successfully FUDding all the average joes cited above.
• Mono supporters lament FUD being spread to Mono by evil Mono bashers.

And you call those (legitimate) concerns FUD ?  Even if,  Microsoft FUD is a required dependency for the anti Mono FUD (*hint* *hint*)

Too hard ?

Pressure Novell to clear up the issue, to publish the whole agreements with Microsoft, to expose the patents, and to work with them to widen the patent protection to everyone. Do that and the anti Mono FUD will fall immediately.

It’s that simple.

I’ll leave you with a koan: “How to package iFolder?”

Good work.

Several people around the net are increasingly disappointed by the UI redesign (originally meant for Hardy if I recall correctly) getting postponed from cycle to cycle, from year to year.  [I apologize on lack of time to cite sources here]

Don’t be so insistent about it. Really. It’s not that other distributions redesign that much, beside maybe a new wallpaper every so often.

If you can’t get a design team together or can’t get it to work in time for a release, it’s not that problem.

Next year, we swear !

Just stop promising it, it’s okay. Until you can – at least – show a handful of credible mockups.

[image credits]

What I like about Apple is their skill to surprise people, but when it comes to their aggressive legal behaviour with competitors, well… that’s definitely no longer the case.

News is that Apple recently sent a cease and desist letter to Procreate, claiming copyright trademark infringement cause by their product Podium. The claim is about the name which too closely resembles iPod and the product’s design which closely resembles Apple products design.

Here’s an excerpt of the letter, provided by TUAW:

The term POD has also been adopted and used extensively in the marketplace by consumers as an abbreviation to refer to Apple’s IPOD player. The IPOD and POD marks indicate to consumers that a broad range of products, including portable electronic devices, computer software, and related goods and services bearing those marks and marks similar thereto originate from or are sponsored or endorsed by Apple.

Now, about the similar design, the thing I can think of is the iMac. For the sake of comparison, here’s Podium:

Here’s the iMac:

How similar those two products really are ? And being so simple in design, are any of them copyrightable ?

Apparently, Apple’s letter also cites Procreate’s website being too similar to Apple’s. Here’s Procreate’s websiste, and here’s Podium’s website. Has apple copyrighted the white and light gray colors or what ?

My take is they just want third party gadget vendors to pay Apple tax on what they earn.

Procreate’s defense until now, is as simple as in “take a look at the dictionary“:

Podium (noun)
Etmyology: Latin
Date originally used: 1743 (a good 243 years before Apple was founded)
1: a low wall serving as a foundation or terrace wall: as a: one around the arena of an ancient amphitheater serving as a base for the tiers of seats b: the masonry under the stylobate of a temple
2: a dais especially for an orchestral conductor
Source: Merriam-Webster

As for me, I bought three Apple products until now. Do I feel bad about that ? Yes, somehow.

Ok ok, to the point

Italy’s public television service (RAI)  just launched a new portal, full of videos. Can you guess which technology did they choose to empower the whole ? Yes, Silverlight (how did you know ?).

This sounds like a terrible choice for a public service payed with citizen’s money (and nothwithstanding the fact is publicy sustained it’s also ridden with ads). Even worse the new site has to be reported to stop working if you disable the drm option of the Silverlight plugin.

Sad memories

This brings to the memory the bitter image of italia.it, launched by italian politicians as the central and official resource for tourists, which turned out to be an useless stinky piece of crap that we payed 45 millions of euros (yeah, you read that right). Needless to say, it lasted online more or less five months and got offline right after. See in the picture below what used people to think about that website:

“merda” is best translated as “shit” [image credits]

What the ultimate goal of that miserable failure seemed to people was letting some (government’s) friend get the work and make big money out of it. Of course, the work has just got sub-contracted to other companies (IBM, ITS, Tiscover).

Oh, back to the point (again)

Concluding, always well aware to the spirit of times, we managed to put online nothing but a sad mess of drm-filled silverlight clips.

Needless to say they don’t provide any alternative format.And while Moonlight is available to some Linux users, is not available to everyone. Not to PPC mac users. Nor is an open format (like ogg). Nor is at least an estabilished standard (like Flash).

Why all this pain ? Probably for the same exact reasons that lead to the planning and launch (and failure) of italia.it: friends.

Wherever you are, don’t let your representatives do the same with your money.  As you may have guessed, we can’t do much about it, we’re in Italy.

Hey, don’t think think I’m angry

I’m not, I’m used. They do much worse. Like ? Like trying to make people pay the tv tax for computers (without tv tuner) as well, as they are theoretically adaptable to see television (by buying a tv tuner). Fun, uh ?

Forgot, digg !

Because of this, I had to find my way manually. But, in the middle of the process, I stupidly executed a command ( dmraid -rE /dev/sda ) which destroyed all my first disk metadata partition.

My raid setup was an Intel based Raid 0.

My /dev/sdb metadata is intact, anyone knows a way (or a tool) to restore my raid ? Seems like I lost everything .